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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with you about how foundational this is, I think chatGPt (as a concept, not a given instantiaiton) is mostly a toy people will get bored with (and not a stepping stone to something more like AGI)

But whether I'm wrong or not I'm very excited about the idea of a ground-up paid service like this that could potentially have a b2c business model based on people actually paying for it instead of being a product sold to advertisers. I hope we're at the beginning of a shift to widespread paid "information" products and away from the race to the bottom an ad-supported tech ecosystem has become

Edited to be more precise

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Dunno if I agree about the "toy" part.

I was learning a new programming language the other day and ChatGPT was able to provide much more focused/helpful responses than Google. Specifically about details of Rust borrow checker, certain syntax etc

It's true that it can give false info at times, but everything it fed to me was true at the time. Time to meaningful response much faster than Google for certain categories of questions...

It may not be a step towards AGI at all, but it's certainly useful

It's certainly at least a step to far better knowledge aggregation, with SEO rapidly ruining search engines as they currently exist.

I think the filler SEO pages rubbed onto ChatGPT giving it a sort of roundabout filler tone.

Agreed. Same experience. It can often ouput some falsities but when one knows what they are doing... It can accelerate coding quite a lot or be a great help in designing algorithms.

Especially since it can ouput code. (from a statement of requirements in natutal language)

Pretty useful.

Faster than going through links after links on a search engine.

> It may not be a step towards AGI at all

It caught on quite quickly for it not to be something very important.

>not a stepping stone to something more like AGI

Why does AGI even need to be part of any of these discussions? It's a ridiculous pop-sci topic, and anyone who works in ML knows we're nowhere near achieving AGI.

That said, what ChatGPT/GPT-3/LLMs represent is a potential new way for people to interact with a corpus of documents that goes far beyond traditional search and knowledge graphs.

It bears mentioning that the mission of OpenAI is to work towards AGI. ChatGPT is, in the view of OpenAI, one step among many along the way. How it fits into their vision, no clue. But they are certainly happy to monetize this toy to continue funding their real mission. To this outsider, it looks like a win win.

> OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.

> We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

https://openai.com/about/

I think you're wrong, many programmers already prefer ChatGPT over StackOverflow.

Stack Overflow is an amazing tool to find solutions to problems that worked 5 to 10 years ago, while newer versions of those questions get closed for being duplicates.

As they should be. No sense in fragmenting questions just because the best answer may have changed.

I don't.

I asked it a solution to a problem using Flask and it gave me a partially working and an incredibly naive solution. I went to Google and found a few naive solutions each with discussions about why they will not work in certain cases. I spotted a blog by a trusted expert, and found the answer I wanted. GPT was convinced, however, that is naive solution was fine.

I think it's easy to see it as a toy, that's basically how I played with it to start with, it's fun to get it to write stuff about all kinds of things. But it actually has a fair amount of knowledge that has crossed over a threshold where it is useful to ask it questions on a bunch of topics, including programming.

> I think chatGPt is mostly a toy people will get bored with.

I think that would be correct, if ChatGPT doesn't continue to improve.

Given the rate of progress so far, most of us are expecting that there will be much more progress, and it will continue to add more value. This is where it becomes foundational.

Or Skynet :-)

What are examples of that rate of progress? Are you talking about ChatGPT itself or the field?

Both. Everything around ai is moving incredibly fast.

Could you give some concrete examples in ChatGPT's? This field is very abstract to me.

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